mental health

Schools in Connecticut and across the nation are reporting a consistent rise in the number of students with mental health issues, and an increase in the complexity and severity of problems. This week, WNPR focuses attention on a particularly troubling condition: self-injury.

Fighting and heavy airstrikes in Yemen have left many wondering what lies ahead for a country that’s engaged in what many are calling a “proxy war.” This hour, we get an update from former U.S. ambassador Mark Hambley .

Updated at 1:13 a.m. ET German prosecutors say the co-pilot of the Germanwings plane who crashed the aircraft into the French Alps on March 24 apparently used his tablet computer to search the Internet for ways to commit suicide and for the safety features of cockpit doors. Separately, French prosecutors say the second black box of Flight 4U 9525 has been recovered. The Internet searches covered the dates March 16 to March 23. One search was related to "medical treatment ......

It was a bitter cold Friday in March, and Sal Pinna was heading into the wind on Main Street in Hartford. "Cold enough, but I don't feel a thing," Pinna said. "I guess I’m used to it." Pinna, a Long Island native, has been homeless for 20 years in Connecticut, but he wants very much to get an apartment. He has in his backpack a xeroxed copy of his birth certificate – but that’s not good enough for official paperwork. Without proper identification, Pinna is stuck in shelters, or worse.

Updated at 11:05 a.m. ET The co-pilot who deliberately downed an airliner over the French Alps this week, killing all 150 aboard, had told a girlfriend sometime last year that he would "do something" that would make people remember his name, a German newspaper reports. Andreas Lubitz, 27, who reportedly had hidden a note declaring him medically unfit to fly on the day he crashed the Germanwings A320, told a former girlfriend and flight attendant, identified by Bild ...

Doctors have been treating the symptoms of their patients, often before they know the cause, for centuries. But as medicine has gained sophistication and precision, we've slowly demanded more of our doctors. We want them to treat us, but also to know what we have, and why we have it, and how to treat and cure it.

After more than two years, the Sandy Hook Advisory Commission has released its final report to Governor Dannel Malloy. T he 16-member panel has pored over the details of December 14, 2012, trying to figure out why the Sandy Hook tragedy happened in the first place, and pinpointing specific measures that would prevent such a tragedy in the future.

Salvatore Pinna , 52, grew up on Long Island and came to Connecticut 20 years ago. In official parlance, Pinna is chronically homeless, which is how the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development describes someone who has been homeless for a year or more, or who has had at least four incidences of homelessness in three years, and has a disability. Pinna more than fits the description. He has effectively been homeless since he came to Connecticut in the '90s. Some of that time he spent living on the streets and sleeping under bridges.

Salvatore Pinna moved to Connecticut 20 years ago. The 52-year-old has been living on the streets and under bridges since he moved here. He's one of many chronically homeless people in the state. This hour, we meet Sal and hear the first of a series of stories about homelessness in Greater Hartford, where the 100-Day Challenge is about to begin, an initiative to try to to eliminate barriers and connect stakeholders -- to create a plan to end chronic homelessness -- in 100 days. We hear more...

My mother was an Alzheimer's patient. I think it's fair to say the disease killed her although like a lot of people in their 80's with serious illnesses, she got caught in a whirlpool of problems that made it hard to pin the blame on any one thing. A few weeks ago I heard from a man who taught science at Kingswood, where I went to school for six years when it was still a boys school. His wife has Alzheimer's Disease. She was a science teacher too. She's in a residential care facility and true...

A study co-authored by Yale University finds a link between problem gambling and obsessive-compulsive behaviors. Over the years, it's been difficult for psychiatrists to classify problem gambling. It was once considered a impulse control disorder. In the latest edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders , problem gambling is classified as an addiction. A new study by Yale University, St. Louis University, and the VA finds an overlap between problem gambling and obsessive compulsive behaviors.

A panel created by Connecticut Governor Dannel Malloy in the wake of the Newtown school shooting has issued a set of draft recommendations aimed at avoiding another tragedy like Sandy Hook. The 256-page report from the Sandy Hook Advisory Commission was posted online Thursday. The report offers recommendations in the areas of school design and operations, mental health, and law enforcement.

The U.S. Senate approved the Clay Hunt Suicide Prevention for American Veterans Act by a vote of 99-0 Tuesday afternoon. The bill seeks to improve mental health care and suicide prevention resources for veterans . The federal VA estimates 22 veterans die by suicide each day. Marine Clay Hunt has become the face of the suicide epidemic. Hunt killed himself in 2011 after deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan. His family and veteran advocates say he struggled with post-traumatic stress disorder and received inadequate care from the VA before taking his own life.

The Alzheimer’s Association says about five million people in the United States have some form of dementia. They expect that number to increase dramatically as baby boomers age and more people live longer. By 2050, we can expect that number to rise to about a million new diagnoses every year. Unless things change, many of us will end up in nursing homes.

Yale University and the state are now offering a new treatment to young people living in the New Haven area who are experiencing psychotic symptoms. The treatment is also the subject of a soon-to-be-released study.

Fear is one of the strongest and most basic of human emotions, and it's the focus of Fearless, the second episode of Invisibilia , NPR's new show on the invisible forces that shape human behavior. This segment of the show explores how a man decided to conquer his fear of rejection by getting rejected every day — on purpose. The evolution of Jason Comely, a freelance IT guy from Cambridge, Ontario, began one sad night several years ago. "That Friday evening that I...

Since 1993, the Eisenhower Center in Ann Arbor, Mich., has been working to rehabilitate veterans of the military who’ve suffered traumatic brain injuries in combat. Recently, the centers program called After the Impact has also begun serving football players experiencing impairment as a result of concussions or sub-concussive hits. According to the NFL , almost 30 percent of the players retired from the league suffer or will suffer from conditions related to brain injury , conditions that...

When Priscilla Graham-Farmer went to get her hair done in Newark, N.J., recently, she noticed the elevator in the building was broken, so she took the stairs. And that's when Graham-Farmer saw him: a young guy sprawled out, not breathing. "He was literally turning blue," she says. "And everybody was walking over him." But Graham-Farmer stopped. And looked closer. She saw that he had a needle and some cotton balls. The guy had clearly overdosed. "I'm screaming in the hallway," Graham-Farmer...

It’s been two years since a gunman killed his mother at home and then opened fire at the Sandy Hook Elementary School, killing 20 first-graders, six educators, and himself. But experts are still hashing out just how parents and educators should handle children like Adam Lanza.

Last month, the Office of the Child Advocate released a report on Newtown school shooter Adam Lanza. It details Lanza's mental health history and how the educational system handled his case. We sit down with the state's child advocate, Sarah Eagan, to get a better sense of how Lanza slipped through the cracks of the educational system. We also hear from others who worked on the report.

Nearly two years after the shooting at Sandy Hook, officials are still looking for answers. A new report from the Office of the Child Advocate provides a window in the mental health of the gunman, Adam Lanza .